How Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, And Others Get Lured to Films For Way Below Their Asking Price

There’s a reason you pretty much only see Johnny Depp in massive movies these days—at $20 million per film, the actor’s requested salary, or “quote,” is exorbitant to everything but the pirates and lone rangers of the world. But Into the Woods, the Rob Marshall-directed musical coming this Christmas, is definitely not a $200 million production. So how’d they get Johnny Depp to play The Wolf?

They boarded him. It may sound like some newfangled Method-acting technique, or maybe a top-secret spa procedure, but “boarding” is, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the new way for projects to get top-tier talent without having to double their budgets to hire them. Depp was paid just $1 million to be in Into the Woods, but he only spent a week on set; the Reporter says he did the role as a favor to his Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides director Marshall, but $1 million for a week of work can’t be bad, either. The same process was used to get Meryl Streep in the upcoming children’s book adaptation The Giver—the Weinstein Company’s David Glasser explains, “We were able to drop Meryl in for 10 days, which was a win-win because we get Meryl to promote the movie, but no one gets paid a big salary."

In the best case scenario, you get good work from a star who wouldn’t otherwise have time to be in your film, even if they’re impatiently looking at their watch to see when they can get out of there; an anonymous source from the set of The Departed recalls seeing Jack Nicholson’s representative point as his watch when his client’s time was “up.” On the other hand, you can wind up with Bruce Willis, about whom one top producer tells THR, “Everyone knows he is for sale for $1 million a day.” That number is surprisingly literal—offered $3 million to spend four days on the set of the third Expendables movie, Willis demanded $4 million and walked away when he didn’t get it.

The boarding system is a win-win for the people on either side of the process—stars still get to make money, we get to see these stars ham it up in giant movies they might not otherwise touch—but a nightmare for the people actually responsible for making the movies happen. Is it worth torturing the costume designer to whisk Johnny Depp in and out of every scene within 10 days, if that means you can add an extra $20 million at the box office? Nobody in the industry was available to answer our hypothetical, because they were too busy thinking of all the yachts they could buy with that extra $20 million.